


Glossophilia

by AstroGirl



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Ficlet, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-03
Updated: 2009-12-03
Packaged: 2017-10-04 03:18:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AstroGirl/pseuds/AstroGirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gallifreyan is almost a dead tongue.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Glossophilia

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the _Doctor Who_ anonymous porn meme of LiveJournal, though it isn't really porny, per se. The prompt, for the record, was:
> 
> _Doctor/Master: speaking Gallifreyan  
> Gallifreyan dirty talk/sexual metaphors/time-related imagery  
> So I guess this would be glossophilia_
> 
> I'm almost thinking of it as a continuation of ["Paleolinguistics"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/25395), actually.
> 
> It _feels_ like it ought to be much higher-rated, but I think it's actually sort of PG-ish. Contains slashiness and sexually suggestive language, though. Well, it's pretty much _about_ sexually suggestive language.

Gallifreyan is almost a dead tongue, but in the Master's mouth it lives, shaping effortless, liquid syllables into tenses lesser languages will confess to only under torture: "You are always going to have been mine."

It lays complex temporal concepts bare, stripping them down to simple statements, to elegant verbs: "I have inserted myself into your timeline." (But the connotations are layered: penetrative, yes, and forceful, but deliberately and skillfully so, implications of knowing exactly how and when/where to enter a desired reality, of possessing the power and control to make it bend around you until it believes that you belong.)

Unashamed, it forms gleeful, dirty words: "I have broken time for you." A scandalous taboo, a phrase young lovers whisper in moments when they believe themselves daring and naughty: I would break time for you. If time took you from me, they mean, I would do the forbidden and unthinkable until it gave you back. (Of course, they never do. In the past-that-now-never-was (one single Gallifreyan word), they never would-have/never-did.)

And the Doctor listens. He cannot help but listen. The literal meanings sicken him, the metaphors thrill him. The sound of the words enters him and fills him and makes him want to weep.

Behind his smile, the Master's living tongue keeps moving, always closer, ancient knowledge spilling forth in a steady stream of breath, until at last the Doctor opens his mouth and meets it with his own.


End file.
